It is rocket science: $100M for new NASA rocket?

In what could become a boost to Central Florida’s economy, the Senate Armed Services Committee approved a budget plan Thursday that includes $100 million for a large new rocket.

As tech people in Orlando are fond of saying, Central Florida is one of few places in the world where you actually have rocket science. The plan announced Thursday is for a military program, but a spokesman for Sen. Bill Nelson, D-FL, said the plan has implications for NASA. (A previous version of this blog linked the funding directly to NASA.)

Nelson linked the plan to heightened tension with Russia in a news release.

“Mr. Putin’s Russia is giving us some problems,” said Nelson, a senior member of the committee. “So we put $100 million in the defense bill to develop a state-of-the-art rocket engine to make sure that we have assured access to space for our astronauts as well as our military space payloads.”

According to the release, the nation’s military depends on the Russian-made RD-180 rocket engine to lift heavy satellites into earth’s orbit.

Reuters noted in a April 30 article that U.S. reliance on Russian engines has been a long-time concern for lawmakers, but those worries have been heightened by Russian actions Washington believes are destabilizing Ukraine.